I’ve got that May Day feeling…

Maypole Dance (Photo by Gale Oliphant)

I was invited by Nanette Davidson to participate in last Saturday’s May Day celebration, in particular the maypole dance and the parade, and I felt honored.  Work/studies tend to be seen as more transient members of the Brasstown Folk School community, at best benign passers-through.  Now – individuals choose to be work/studies for a variety of reasons: to learn a specific craft, to gain gardening experience, to celebrate and enjoy the beauty of the area.  Essentially they’re largely drawn to the Folk School for the same reasons as paying students.  Key, of course, to the experience of all studying here is… community.  The school offers students a week or weekend of communal living, eating, working and learning.  Work studies come for this too – but we stay longer.

I tend to think community and tradition are inextricably linked, and Brasstown has a very elaborate relationship with the idea of tradition. Very old traditions, ones consciously preserved by the school (ballad singing, timber framing, morning song, etc), intertwine with traditions that came to this region through the Folk School (like Morris and Garland dancing) and are all wrapped up in and coiled around newer Brasstown traditions (Sunday breakfast at at Tim Ryan’s house, St. Patrick’s Day at the Depot, endless potlucks, work studies throwing deserts at each other after lunch), topped off with traditions that are frankly as old as human beings living amongst each other (like sitting around a fire, and making things grow out of the dirt.) What I’m trying to get at is this: the feeling of community here is an interesting and complex but unique and wonderful thing, and I guess I’m still a little high from the feeling of welcome that I had on May Day.  I know that I was not the only one.

The rain held off, but just barely, and there was a feeling of electricity in the air. The wind was high, the music was silly, the dancing was spectacular, and everybody seemed to be having a grand old time.

Dames Rockets (Photo by Michael Baker)